The Sacagawea Golden Dollar: AN ENIGMA WRAPPED IN A HISTORY LESSON

Its namesake is as enigmatic as the coin itself. First issued in 2000, the Sacagawea Golden Dollar is an expedition into coin collecting that, like the westward journey of Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, navigates an unlikely course of cultural touchstones from the Continental Divide to Cheerios cereal to jazz artist Harry Connick, Jr.

- L.A. SOKOLOWSKI

BIRD WOMAN 

This much we know. A teenaged Lemhi Shoshone girl, known as Sacagawea ('Bird Woman'), guided Lewis and Clark on the chartered Corps of Discovery expedition from North Dakota to the Pacific Ocean. She was born in the spring of 1788 into the Agaidika 'Salmon Eater' people and at age 12, taken captive during a raid by a Hidatsa hunting party. Conflicting accounts say she was then purchased outright, or won through gambling by Toussaint Charbonneau, a Quebecois fur trapper. A year later, Sacagawea was his wife and, by 1804, expecting their first child.¹

Lewis and Clark had just parted ways at Fort Mandan in North Dakota with their original translator when they met and recruited Charbonneau, whose command of French and Hidatsa was helpful, but whose Shoshonefluent wives, Sacagawea and Otter Woman, were the true assets.

In a November 1804 journal entry, Clark wrote, "A french man by Name Chabonah, who speaks the Big Belley language, visit us, he wished to hire and informed us his 2 Squars were Snake Indians, we engau [engaged] him to go on with us and take one of his wives to interpret the Snake language..." "2

Sacagawea and Charbonneau joined Lewis and Clark in November 1804 at Fort Mandan where, on February 11, 1805, she delivered a son, Jean Baptiste. Clark, who called her 'Janey, nicknamed the boy 'Pomp.